Taking a Stand Against a Giant Data Center... in Utah

Thanks to Bill Lindeke for pointing me to this Guardian article on a giant Stratos data center that was recently approved by commissioners in a Utah county. It would be larger than Manhattan Island and will use 9GW of electricity. That's more than all of the electricity Utah currently uses. Its Shark Tank celebrity backer says they'll build their own clean energy to add to the grid, but he somehow doesn't seem to know that fossil gas is not "clean."

The data center will also, of course, use a large amount of water in a state that is not known as a water paradise, and has specifically been in a drought recently.

And get this: 

The network of industrial-scale fans needed to cool the datacenter’s hot pipes will result in so much waste heat that it could raise daytime temperatures in the surrounding Hansel valley by 2F to 5F (1.1C to 2.7C) and night-time temperatures by 8F to 12F (4.4C to 6.6C), according to an analysis by Rob Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.

Not surprisingly, there has been huge push back from residents against the build. They have filed for

a referendum to reverse the commissioners’ approval of Stratos. If the group is able to collect 5,422 signatures from registered voters in the county in the next 45 days, the project approval will go to a vote in November.

Utah's governor, Spencer Cox, is quoted as saying, "Industry* is our state’s motto," but also that he will make sure to "require that the Stratos project doesn’t harm the Great Salt Lake or raise power bills."

His waffling sounds a lot like Minnesota Republicans promising that mining in or near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area won't affect the water there or in nearby communities, as they work to please corporate interests and billionaire owners. 

How will they guarantee that? The answer is, they won't. They'll let the project go forward and then hope people forget, once it's in place.

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* Industry, as in the Utah motto, did not mean modern-day corporate industry. When it became the motto, it would have meant something closer to the original meanings of the word: habitual diligence or effort, which came from the Latin industria, which meant diligence, activity, or zeal. 

Kind of the opposite of how people use AI.